Over the past month, over 400 hundred students have signed a petition to end annual 8% tuition fee hikes at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. I wasn’t one of them.
While the petition is rooted in good intentions, it is unrealistic, unnecessarily confrontational and founded on a debatable premise.
The petition requests that:
- The administration, working with the student body, find a sustainable alternative to annual 8 percent tuition fee increases;
- The administration, working with the student body, reverse the growing gap between tuition fees and financial aid; and
- That tuition fees not increase until such a plan is in place.
2. The administration, working with the student body, reverse the growing gap between tuition fees and financial aid;
First, let’s get the Part 2 out of the way. There is a widely-accepted theory in higher education that the fairest way to bill students is to charge incredibly high rates to students who can afford it while heavily subsidizing those who cannot.
I agree with this approach. It’s fair. Charge high tuition and capture wealthy students’ consumer surplus and use some of this extra revenue to subsidize poorer students. This maximizes revenue (and therefore maximizes what the Faculty can provide to its students) while maintaining accessibility. To that end, the Faculty should be encouraged to increase financial aid in line with tuition.
[Update: In response to the petition, the Faculty has released a Discussion Document indicating that this is already happening. Still, the petition was right to advocate for this.]
Part 1 and Part 3 of the petition, however, are problematic. Part 1 is a (debatable) normative statement about individual priorities while Part 3 is just unrealistic.
1. The administration, working with the student body, find a sustainable alternative to annual 8 percent tuition fee increases;
One thing that is lost in the “lower tuition would be good” platitude is that our tuition actually does pay for stuff. U of T has an enviable stable of eminent tenured faculty, small class sizes and an array of clinical and exchange programs, all of which enhance our quality of education. Unfortunately, the only way to stop increasing our tuition is to compromise on some of these things.
This is an inescapable truth, although many ignore it. While some students don’t think these advantages are worth $30,000/year, many do. In fact, everyone who applies to and accepts a position a U of T makes a calculation in their mind and decides that the benefits of attending U of T are worth the cost.
Some students incur the cost because they want the best shot possible at a high-paying job. Others want to be educated by leading professors in their field, to take part in unique exchange programs and clinical opportunities, or to build a network of the future leaders of our profession.
Maybe some students would rather have fewer tenured professors and be taught by more adjuncts. Maybe some would prefer that small groups have 20 students instead of 14. Maybe DLS should hire fewer students each summer and maybe LAWS isn’t a worthwhile use of our tuition dollars.
Ultimately, anyone who gets into U of T can get a Scotiabank loan. Understandably, many students don’t want to do this, and choose not to come.
Do we want to make U of T Law less expensive and more accessible (i.e. by imposing a more palatable debt load) or do we want to hire more and better faculty and offer more programs? It’s a legitimate debate, but not one with an obvious answer.
3. That tuition fees not increase until such a plan is in place.
This is impossible.
In response to the tuition petition, the Administration released a Discussion Document explaining just why it has to keep increasing first year tuition at 8% per year and upper year tuition by 4%.
The executive summary: Provincial funding has been frozen since 2006. In order to meet its many expenses (growing at 4.6%/year) since then, the faculty has had to increase tuition by the maximum allowable amount every year.
Why have costs been increasing at 4.6% per year? Faculty and staff salaries, per U of T-wide collective bargaining, have been increasing every year; faculty has expanded; financial aid has increased; and more funding has been devoted to research support and public interest programs.
We could hire fewer professors and even let some non-tenured ones go, but that is a decision that requires more debate. Most of the faculty’s costs are non-negotiable and tuition happens to be the only revenue it can control.
It should be noted that since 2006, Ottawa U, Queen’s and Osgoode have all increased their first year and upper year tuition fees by 8% and 4%, respectively, every year. While I have been unable to find comparable data on Western and Windsor, one can assume that they have done the same as they face the same structural issues we do.
As a result of my substantive issues with two thirds of the petition, I decided not to sign it. While the Part 2 request is commendable, its strength is ultimately diluted both by the petition’s other requests and by the medium of the petition itself.
A petition is visible and a petition is aggressive. Under the circumstances, such an approach was uncalled for. While UV contributors such as Dan Bertrand mean well (“Talk Has Failed: Act to Stop the Gap between Tuition and Financial Aid”), they are mistaken in their assumption that students have long railed, in an organized and constructive fashion, against a growing gap between tuition and financial aid to no avail.
The fact is, the SLS and the Administration only just began discussing these issues this year. And both sides are very optimistic. While some credit is due to the organizers of the petition for bringing the issue to the SLS’s attention, there was no need to issue a petition, disrupt Welcome Day and obtain negative publicity in order to do so.
Until the Administration tunes out our elected representatives and ignores their requests for dialogue, a disruptive petition is the wrong way to engage it on these issues.
